Birmingham: The City That Built Britain and Never Got Enough Credit For It

Birmingham made the industrial revolution. The city’s workshops and factories produced the metalwork, the guns, the steam engines, and the cheap manufactured goods that changed the world between roughly 1750 and 1900. Its Jewellery Quarter alone still produces approximately 40% of British jewellery today. The canal network (more miles of canals than Venice, a fact repeated so often in Birmingham tourism that it has become a cliché, though it remains true) was built to move goods from factory to market before the railways existed. The city rebuilt itself after WWII bombing, reinvented itself after deindustrialisation, and hosted the 2022 Commonwealth Games without the crisis that Commonwealth Games tend to produce. It is the most underestimated major city in the UK, and the gap between its reputation and its actual quality has been closing fast.

The Jewellery Quarter

The Jewellery Quarter has been declared a World Craft City, placing it alongside Kyoto and Jaipur on the global craft map. The recognition is overdue. Over 100 independent specialist retailers and craftspeople operate here, with bespoke pieces commissionable on-site at prices that undercut the London high street considerably. The Museum of the Jewellery Quarter is housed in the preserved Smith and Pepper factory, a jewellery manufacturer that closed in 1981 and was left exactly as it was on the last working day, tools on benches, works in progress abandoned. Free entry. One of the most specific and effective industrial museums in England.

The Pen Museum nearby covers Birmingham’s 19th-century dominance of pen nib production, when the city supplied most of the world’s steel writing nibs. This is niche, clearly, but the machinery on display and the scale of what the city’s workshops once produced make it a worthwhile hour.

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

The collection includes the largest Pre-Raphaelite holdings in the world, the result of Birmingham’s wealthy Victorian manufacturing class buying contemporary art when the Pre-Raphaelites were still controversial and affordable. The Burne-Jones room alone is worth the visit. The adjacent Roundhouse Birmingham, a Victorian industrial building converted for events and exhibitions, hosts regularly changing shows alongside the permanent collection.

The Canal Network and Brindleyplace

The canal basin at Brindleyplace in the city centre has been redeveloped from derelict wharves into one of the better urban waterfront areas in England. Bars, restaurants, and galleries occupy converted warehouse buildings along the towpaths. Ikon Gallery in a converted Gothic school building runs contemporary art exhibitions of genuine quality, free entry.

Walking the towpaths west from Brindleyplace toward Smethwick along the Old Main Line canal gives you the most intact section of early industrial canal infrastructure in the Midlands: original Telford engineering, old lock-keeper cottages, and a scale of civil engineering that puts the commercial district’s glass towers in context.

Where to Eat

Birmingham’s curry reputation is real and the best of it is in the Balti Triangle, a concentration of South Asian restaurants south of the city centre around Moseley and Sparkhill. A Birmingham Balti, served in the steel pan it was cooked in with naan bread for scooping, is the city’s most distinctive food contribution: don’t leave without eating one at a restaurant that actually makes it fresh rather than microwaving a portion.

The Wilderness in the Jewellery Quarter holds a Michelin star and does ambitious tasting menus in a relaxed setting. If you’re doing one proper dinner in Birmingham, this is the reference point.

The Birmingham Restaurant Festival runs every August across dozens of city restaurants, with set menus and tasting tours at accessible prices. Worth planning a visit around if your dates align.

Cadbury World

The Cadbury factory and visitor experience at Bournville, 4 miles south of the centre, is a genuinely interesting piece of industrial and social history: the Cadbury family, Quakers, built the factory in 1879 and then built a model village around it, including parks, sports grounds, and housing with gardens, on the principle that workers needed decent conditions to be productive. The social experiment at Bournville was one of the more influential pieces of industrial paternalism in English history. The chocolate-making demonstration is for children; the history is for adults.

Where to Stay

The Grand Hotel Birmingham on Colmore Row is the city’s best historic hotel: Victorian grandeur restored, central location, good restaurant. Staying in Digbeth (Birmingham’s creative quarter, south of the centre) puts you in a neighbourhood with independent venues and art spaces that feels more authentically current than the city-centre options. Hotel rates in Birmingham are considerably lower than London for comparable quality, which is part of the argument for a city break here over a weekend in the capital.

Getting There

New Street Station is the main rail hub, served by frequent trains from London Euston (about 85 minutes by the fastest services), Manchester (about 80 minutes), and Bristol. Birmingham Airport is 8 miles from the centre with rail connections to New Street in about 15 minutes.